For some time, I have had a growing sense of unease about the Christian use of words like "deconstruction," "de-conversion," and the ever-popular polling category, "the nones." I've used the terms myself and have had to make a conscious effort to avoid them when speaking about those who have renounced Christian faith. Such words, I have come to think, owe too much to a secular conception of what happens when a person abandons the faith and rely too little on Scripture’s own witness to the power of the Gospel to transform human lives.
A basic premise of secularism is that our unenlightened forbears viewed reality through the lens of religious myths—myths that must be stripped away in order to see the world for what it is. This is why Charles Taylor calls secularism a "subtraction story.” The subtraction story has come to be told in two forms—an earlier form associated with “modernity” and a more recent form associated with both “postmodernity” and “metamodernity.” The term “deconstruction” was introduced to public discourse by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida and is central to metamodernity—a form of late-stage postmodernity. However, in a broad sense, the concept was already central to modernity. Modernity, like its successors, began with the assumption that there is something to be undone.
For modernity, the thing to be dismantled was religion. While debates still swirl about the historical forces and intellectual currents that led to this dismantling–Taylor puts it down to the aniconic impulses of the Reformation–the world that preceded the rise of modernity was certainly not united by religion. Still, to a very great extent it was uniformly religious. The rise of modernity brought that to an end, though not, as it turned out, as an end in itself.
The deconstruction of religious myths gave reason room to work, unencumbered by claims of revelation about things we cannot see. In this way, modernity claimed the mantle of “enlightenment”—the courage to set aside religious myths and engage the world with reason alone. The mood of this deconstruction was optimistic: it cleared the ground for new construction—the creation of new metanarratives built from reason rather than revelation. These are the “isms” that have shaped the modern world. Arguably none of these new metanarratives were wholly false. Some narrate claims about the world that resemble claims of the Christian story and underwrite political orders (e.g. liberalism) that make space for Chrisitian witness. But none of them should be regarded as Christian, even when they co-opt the symbols and ideas native to the story of Scripture. All have the potential to become virulent. Some have.
If the mood that fostered the metanarratives of modernity was optimistic, the mood would sour. The blood-letting perpetrated by ideologues prepared to put the worst schemes of modernity’s system-builders to the test far surpassed that of the so-called “Wars of Religion.” The scope and scale of the violence inspired by modern metanarratives helped give rise to postmodernity—a response reduced to one word by Richard Rorty: “‘No.’”
If the signature move of modernity was to pair its deconstruction of religion with new constructions of reason, the signature move of postmodernity is to deconstruct every new construction. The deconstructive impulse of postmodernity makes a wasteland. Its mood is cynical. The deconstruction of modernity produced a cleared but fertile field; the deconstruction of postmodernity produced a field cleared and salted. The metanarratives of modernity had soil in which to grow. Claims to universal truth were welcome, so long as they were made with reason alone. Postmodernity, by contrast, thrives in salted soil. It thrives not because it is free of the toxins of metanarrative but because, though it is metanarrative, it claims not to be one. Postmodernity takes its name not from what it affirms, but from what it deconstructs, viz. the metanarratives of modernity.
Still, postmodernity does affirm something, and there’s the rub. Its vaunted powers of deconstruction veil a furtive act of myth-making. At the heart of this myth is the notion that the world is a place that has no meaning; that every attempt to render it meaningful is a play for power over others; and that the only legitimate claim to meaning resides in the self-narration of lived experience. In short, the deconstruction of postmodernity does not bring a person to a neutral field anymore than the deconstruction of modernity. If the supposedly neutral field of modernity denied space to religious metanarratives, the supposedly neutral field of postmodernity denies space to every metanarrative except its own.
The most recent version of postmodernity’s neutral field is the inchoate sensibility known as “metamodernism.” The field remains a wasteland, but there’s a cash bar with cocktails! The mood is playful; the deconstruction less angry. One theorist describes metamodernity as the deconstruction of deconstruction. The principle critique of postmodernity has been that it fails to apply to itself the critique it levels at the meaning-making of modernity. Metamodernity critiques that failure. As the critique of critique, it is “meta” with respect to postmodernity—an irony that plays on and with the central irony of postmodernity. But as postmodernity assumed modernity’s critique of religious metanarratives, metamodernity assumes postmodernity’s critique of all metanarratives—including the metanarrative of postmodernity. It is not a stable claim about reality, because there are none.
With metamodernity, there is meaning to be made, and multiple sources, including religion, from which to make it. However, we should not think that the meaning we make touches reality. In the metamodern version of deconstruction, subjectivity is “the enactment of a truth that cannot be true, the establishment of a holistic, coherent identity that cannot exist.” The snake, it seems, has swallowed its tail. The feast may be unsustainable, but it’s fun while it lasts.
My point of setting out this admittedly potted history of deconstruction is simply that, when Christians use terms such as “deconstruction,” they risk endorsing a secular conception of what is happening when a person leaves the faith. It may tell us what those who abandon the faith think that they are doing in becoming secular. But Christians should be wary: the privileging of an individual’s perspective is itself a feature of postmodernity. This is why for postmodernists and metamodernists alike “lived experience” is the singular measure of truth and why respectful affirmation of “lived experience” is the singular measure of kindness.
Scripture, by contrast, privileges its own judgements about those who turn back after putting their hand to the plow (Luke 9:62) as the judgements of God. So should we. The biblical writers give us little purchase on what those who abandoned Christ in the early decades of the Christian movement thought they were doing. Rather, with an extraordinary diversity of images and idioms, it tells us what they did.
The psalmist warned his generation and every generation after, “do not harden your hearts” (Psalm 95:7-11; cf. Heb. 3:8-15). Jesus spoke of those whose fail to bear fruit because they are distracted, deceived, scandalized by the word, or put off by the prospect of persecution (Mark 4:16-19). Paul spoke of a ministry colleague who deserted him because “he was in love with the world” (2 Tim 4:10). John wrote of those who “went out from us because they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). Whole NT books (Galatians, Hebrews) were written to stave off incipient apostasy among those about to “drift away” (Heb 2:2).
I do not mean to play the crank or to confine our theological vocabulary to words found in Scripture. Rather, my aim is to encourage ways of speaking about the world that accord with Scripture. I suspect that some of the ways that we speak about those who abandon Christian faith and become secular mirrors a secular understanding of what it means to become a Christian in the first place. To speak about “de-construction” implies that becoming a Christian is a matter of constructing a “worldview.” It risks ratifying the claim that becoming a Christian is something like becoming a Marxist or a nationalist or even a postmodernist. It is simply to dismantle one story about the world and to construct another. To speak about “de-conversion” implies that the Gospel imparts a lens, not life.
This is not a true account of conversion. Scripture describes coming to faith as a transformation, as a new birth, as a definitive cleansing, as an inscription of God’s law on human hearts. We reflect the truth of those claims by allowing them to constrain the way we speak about those who come to saving faith and about the tragedy of those who fall away.